


other beginnings:

by sophiahelix



Category: Portrait de la jeune fille en feu | Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Art, F/F, Misses Clause Challenge, Ocean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:15:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28145964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiahelix/pseuds/sophiahelix
Summary: “I’ve wanted to do that for years,” Héloïse says.Marianne’s teeth ache in her mouth, the mortal fear that animated her hobbled dash from the house still retreating, sluggish and caustic in her veins. She grips Benoît, too tight. “Dying?”The tern lands on Héloïse’s shoulder, the orange of his clawed feet even brighter than her tousled hair. His eyes are dark, though, where hers are green—or grey—or blue, or something Marianne can’t name, some color they haven’t invented yet. The sea, she thinks, as if that one word could mean so many things.“Flying,” Héloïse says.
Relationships: Héloïse/Marianne (Portrait of a Lady on Fire)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 54
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	other beginnings:

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theoldgods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoldgods/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I was so happy that you were open to a daemonverse AU and I really enjoyed putting a new lens to canon with it. Creating daemons for the characters is always the most fun part, and I hope you like the ones I invented.
> 
> I made a writing playlist that’s mostly French songs about water, which I think goes well with reading the story:
> 
> https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6G25NIR9QOAdIY1WiM1OwP?si=sqhMeCe0SyyLa9LSwPr-iw

And she takes flight.

No—a trick of the eye, in the grey morning mist. Two motions seem like one, the flapping blue cloak below and the white-feathered wings above. Separate, Marianne sees now, but of a piece: sea and cloud, water transformed. Neither the original, but sharing a gradient of existence.

They’re making for the cliffs.

Her heart jerks in her chest, a dull counterpoint to the bright pain of Benoît nipping at her finger. _Follow_ , he says, and Marianne picks up her feet and her skirts and gives chase over the rough turf. 

Jolting, earthbound, breathless. Pursuing the white wings, the yellow hair, the unseen woman. The impact of the fall aching in her bones, like the tragedy has already happened to her.

At the cliff, Héloïse stops, but her daemon sails on. Pointed wingspan wide, gliding on the air, as though loosed from their bond. Marianne stares, open mouth hot and dry with her own panting breath. In her mind she sees the tern flying to the blue horizon, the tie severed entirely, continuing to the vanishing point.

But he banks and wheels, turning, and so does Héloïse. A tandem revolution, a flash of color in sea fog, wind-whipped and blood-stirred. Pain blooms in Marianne again, but Benoît is soft and safe beneath her hand, tucked inside her coat pocket. It’s something else entirely, like the numb sting of a missing part, rising to life again in phantom memory, fantasies.

“I’ve wanted to do that for years,” Héloïse says.

Marianne’s teeth ache in her mouth, the mortal fear that animated her hobbled dash from the house still retreating, sluggish and caustic in her veins. She grips Benoît, too tight. “Dying?”

The tern lands on Héloïse’s shoulder, the orange of his clawed feet even brighter than her tousled hair. His eyes are dark, though, where hers are green—or grey—or blue, or something Marianne can’t name, some color they haven’t invented yet. The sea, she thinks, as if that one word could mean so many things.

“Flying,” Héloïse says.

*****

At the shore, Héloïse is ever drawn to the waterline. It draws Marianne’s eyes too; the overlapping planes of light and color, a whole sheet of cerulean breaking up into ivory shards, ultramarine shading beyond as it mutters up the shore. Héloïse toys with the sea, wading deeper, the wind blowing out her skirts. For every step she takes, Théophane can fly a little further, and Marianne sees her weight the tension, measuring the distance they can keep without losing each other. One morning he strays and she stays, feet planted wide in the sand as if to hold him here, and another day she voyages further until her dress is wet above the knees, arms outstretched, as if to give him just a little more liberty.

Marianne scribbles in her lap, Benoît on her knee. The wind ruffles his burnt umber fur as she sketches with the charcoal, biting her lip, glancing up. A wave breaks on a rock, sending up spray, and she sees his long, slender body ripple, claws tensing against her skirt.

“Don’t get any ideas,” she tells the mink, scratching out the line of Héloïse’s back.

Benoît leapt from the jollyboat before she could think to, head held above the turbulent harbor waters as he paddled in pursuit of their canvases. He saw what she hadn’t yet, the indifferent stillness of the sailors, their resignation to the loss of someone else’s property if action meant a wetting or worse. By the time Marianne understood, she was already standing up ready to follow Benoît through the waves, compelled by the insistent ache of the tug at her heart.

“You’re the one with all the ideas,” Benoît says, untruthfully, and shuts his small black eyes.

Héloïse is coming back to shore. Marianne tucks her paper into her sleeve and keeps her gaze down, as though she had been studying rocks on the shingle. When she looks up, Théophane is gliding down to perch on a driftwood log, sidling sideways. Sometimes she wonders what he sees from above, if there are things he doesn’t tell Héloïse.

The sun is overhead now, burning through a film of flat grey clouds like linens hanging out to dry. Marianne is hungry, but it doesn’t matter; they’ll return to the house whenever Héloïse turns her back on the water and begins the climb up the cliff. She always marches swift and straight-backed, and as she goes Marianne gathers the glimpses of nose or ear or chin like tumbled shells gleaned from the shore. 

She hasn’t sketched Théophane yet, who only lives in her mind as sleek curves of white and black, the bright ornaments of feet and beak. Milan is far from the ocean, she thinks. 

Héloïse sits in the sand, the coarse grains studding her wet skirts, profile straight as she stares out at the water. Marianne aches to sketch the satin topography of Héloïse’s face, contours obscured and revealed as the wind whips yellow strands of hair across it, and in her lap her finger traces lines, hot as wood-etching but all too transient. When she goes to sleep she sees Héloïse’s eyes but when she goes to the canvas it’s only scattered waves that come out or worse, something close to but utterly unlike Héloïse, as if she’s been preserved with the wrong face.

Marianne has never before doubted the power of art or sight but now every time she blinks she sees a different woman before her, even when Héloïse hasn’t moved at all.

They’re climbing the cliffs; another morning gone, another afternoon’s toil ahead. Benoît will drape himself across her shoulders and murmur in her ear, urging her to change this, increase that, nudging her towards the truth of what she saw this morning. But what is the truth? A woman and a tern, still absent from the sketch, still unwilling to be captured in these smoky lines. The existence of the portrait is not Marianne’s choice, and it’s not Héloïse’s either, but still they must struggle on, even in darkness. 

*****

Héloïse goes to mass, free, and Marianne works. They are both solitary and not alone, Théophane taking to the misty air as Héloïse climbs into the carriage, Benoît weaving himself amongst the bright oily clutter on the painting table. When she comes back, Héloïse will have heard music, and Marianne will have daubed colors on a board, and somehow they’re the same thing.

*****

“Burn it,” Benoît whispers, and she does. The faceless woman keeps her warm for a little while, and then she begins to see faceless women everywhere.

*****

When Marianne tells her the truth, Héloïse walks into the sea. 

*****

Benoît doesn’t need to say it this time. The swipe with the rag seems cruel, but the woman she’s given life to on the canvas is not Héloïse, is not anything but a smiling, wooden puppet, with only the false appearance of anger to animate her. Marianne scrubs, erasing the wince, the dull eyes and rigid chin. A creation born of avarice and ignorance, she thinks. She’s made such things before, but never of such a subject as this.

 _It surprises me that it isn’t close to you,_ Héloïse said, and it surprised Marianne in turn, as if a figure in a painting had spoken to her. Her days have been so occupied with gazing at Héloïse out of the corner of her eye, like a hunter seeking prey. It has not occurred to her that she might also be seen.

*****

A second canvas, and five days to fill it. “What do you think,” she mutters to Benoît, absently, already knowing his reply. They’ll do it because it must be done. 

*****

Abruptly they are united by the problem of Sophie. The race on the beach, Sophie’s glossy little brown terrier barking at her heels, and the mysteries of herbs, potions, rope.

Marianne remembers her own troubles, handled more directly than this in Paris. A certain street, a certain woman, a certain price. A bitter tea, darker than the one they brew in the chateau’s kitchen, and the sense of a relentless ugly tide flowing from her, as though there were second, hidden price to pay for this release from her fate.

It made Benoît ill too, the way her monthlies always had, the way any mortification of her flesh is always reflected in his. He hadn’t ever liked the man’s daemon, a ragged, rusty vixen with one torn ear and a quick tongue, but Marianne had only thought, _they’re too alike_. The man gave her money for the old woman’s tea and then she never saw him again, and maybe they were also alike. Too practical for love, for the reckless indignity of surrender, for pretending that sentiment could be victorious over other desires. For tenderness, for sacrifice.

Marianne has thought of love as many things, and here in the dim kitchen of the chateau it becomes in a moment just one thing, the splendid faceted multitudes of the woman before her, whose eyes in the dark are a wholly different color than in the sun. 

Théophane is drowsing on the table, head tucked under his wing, neck bent at an outrageous angle. Benoît sleeps in her lap, warm and still. Marianne knows love, as loud as a splash of crimson and bright as as a trumpet’s peal, and then Sophie crashes to the floor behind her and she knows ordinary things again. The intimacy of a shared burden, of care. They are love too.

*****

She sketches Héloïse in her bed and they do not kiss. She paints Héloïse in the reception room and they do not kiss. Théophane hops closer to Benoît, plucking at his slender furred tail, and the mink goes still and watchful on the window sill. They regard each other, observer and observed, the white and the red, silent except for some language between them Marianne doesn’t understand.

*****

They have a life, for a little while. Cards and candles, wine and paint, thread, herbs, words, song. The three women; the dog, the bird, the mink. The house is theirs, and the food is theirs, and the fire, but they do not own it and cannot keep it any more than they could keep the sea.

*****

“Perhaps she was the one who said, _turn around_ ,” Héloïse says, and the next night she moves into darkness, consumed by fire, burning and letting herself burn.

It is only later, much later, that Marianne will realize Héloïse had already chosen memory over life, that she would always ask her to turn around and sacrifice them both.

*****

She seeks comfort in Benoît’s warm fur, when Héloïse leaves her alone in the cave after the kiss. He nips her finger gently, climbing her sleeve to cling to her shoulder, and nestles against her neck. 

“You’ve romanticized her,” he says.

“I haven’t,” she says.

“She’s the subject of a portrait,” he says. “A job.”

Marianne shakes her head.

“You’re a servant to her,” he says.

She’s never been that to anyone, not in the half-dozen lives she’s lived with her father and on her own, lodging in strange places to teach or to paint. They are observers, but they decide what it is they see. _The one who holds the brush makes the world_ , her father tells her.

“I scared her away,” Marianne says. It’s happened once before, in the convent school when she was a girl.

“For a little while,” Benoît says, and this is what they do: change positions, one ballast and one lift, to sail an uneven but steady course. “She’ll find you.”

Marianne finds Héloïse in her room that night, waiting by the fireplace. Théophane is perched at the foot of the bed, his feathers a brighter white than the rumpled linens. When Marianne passes by he arches his neck, and she runs her fingers over the smooth black feathers on his head. It’s like caressing a sea of grass, the tiny satin barbs particulate and warm, and Benoît leaves her side to join him on the bed.

When Héloïse touches her, she feels only relief, like a constant of the universe is true again after long doubt. Héloïse’s hands on her, Héloïse’s lips on her. Imagined sensations that have become part of her history, even if they were never real before this moment. 

She teaches Héloïse, in bed. “Will you be the man?” Héloïse asks, when Marianne parts her legs and strokes calloused fingertips over the downy skin of her thighs. 

Marianne smiles, coming closer, stretching out along the length of Héloïse’s unclothed body. She presses a kiss to the damp hollow of her throat and traces her opening, the tender folds. “No man has fingers like mine.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Héloïse says, breathless, and lifts her chin. 

Marianne watches Héloïse’s face as she touches her. The blushes that rise like sea currents, the way she wets her lips, the way her lashes move on her cheeks. The sounds when Marianne circles her bud, when she slips a finger inside. The dark, salty scent of her when Marianne moves closer, brushing her nose through the warm brown hair. The wet heat, the plush flesh, the poignant taste.

Tender and slow the first time; less so the second. The third, Héloïse pulls Marianne up by the hair and cries out in her face, grasping the wrist of Marianne’s hand, thrusting relentless inside her. She bites Marianne’s shoulder with blunt teeth and Marianne sees, from the corner of her eye, Benoît supine on the bed and Théophane standing above, wings stretched as wide as they possibly can.

Before morning, Héloïse murmurs, drowsy, _my first painting_ , and kisses the livid mark that Marianne bears.

*****

They care for Sophie together, and they make art together, and they fly together. Théophane, who almost never speaks, says _that isn’t flying_ in his dry little voice, but Benoît tells her later in the kitchen, “He liked it as much as we did.”

“What did he like?” Marianne murmurs to Benoît, crooking a finger and smoothing his whiskers, before she gets up to refill the water jug.

“All of it,” Benoît replies, taking his place across her shoulders as she climbs the stairs. “He doesn’t want to go.”

“He doesn’t want to go, or he wants to stay?” Marianne asks, and then the white vision appears again.

The light from nowhere, everywhere. Héloïse’s face more lifeless than Marianne has ever painted her, struck and numbed with tragedy. Théophane on the ground at her feet. The poet’s last bitter memory.

Marianne turns from it, carrying water in her mouth.

*****

Like a storm, their strife is dark and deadly in the moment but only an echo of turmoil once it’s passed over. They embrace on the beach, open mouths pressed together, and when their heavy weather recedes they seek shelter in the cave, equally from the shore winds and the bright sun. They hold each other, feeling the last moments slip by.

“When did Théophane settle?” Marianne asks, into the curve of Héloïse’s neck.

“When I was thirteen. When I went to the convent.”

“His form,” Marianne says. “To remember home?”

Héloïse shakes her head. Her hand is restive, spread upon Marianne’s back. “To remember myself.”

The sea, Marianne thinks. The mutable, merciless sea. Always at a distance, with a cold slap in the face for those who seek to know it too well.

_I thought you were braver._

_I thought you were._

“And him?” Héloïse asks, reaching out to stroke along Benoît’s back.

“Later. He was nearly a bird.”

“Like my mother’s?” Héloïse asks, meaning the countess’s fat, jewel-colored parrot. “Or like mine.”

“A hawk,” Marianne says. “To see from far away.”

Héloïse is silent, still stroking Benoît, her thumb moving along his spine. He ripples, arching into it. Marianne wonders if she will touch her husband’s daemon, if he will allow her to touch his.

“You wanted something to keep close to you,” Héloïse says, looking down.

“Yes.”

“You wanted to be able to hold it. To hide it. To carry it with you. To watch for you, without being seen.”

“Héloïse,” Marianne says, and the name becomes something when she shapes it with her mouth, a sip of water or a breath of air. A prayer, if she were a different woman.

Héloïse turns and looks at her, their faces close in the dimness of the cave. Outside, the wind whips the waves into white foam. 

“Have you heard that daemons can change form later in life?” she asks. “Not only children.”

Marianne shakes her head. 

Héloïse breathes fast, through her mouth, chest rising with little hitches. “I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard stories.”

Marianne says nothing.

“There’s a ballad,” Héloïse says. “The lovers’ daemons change places. That way they have a part of each other’s soul forever.”

“It’s just a fable,” Marianne says, but she’s watching Héloïse, and the words come to her again, _are you asking me to resist?_ She sees, she understands, that perhaps Héloïse was asking her to fight because she cannot. 

“If two lovers have birds for daemons,” Héloïse whispers, and now her eyes are shut. “I’ve heard that they can meet anywhere. That in the air they are free.”

“Perhaps,” Marianne whispers back, and then they kiss, and then their bodies are in the wet sand. She lies beneath, with Héloïse in gorgeous green satin above, a tidal force but infinitely warmer than the sea.

*****

Their last hours spend themselves, it seems. Marianne wonders if this is how it is to know the appointment of execution, the exact measure of one’s life. All that they do seems weighty with meaning, immortal, yet inconsequential against the march of time. 

The countess returns. A man. Sophie’s round little arms about her. The thick sheaf of francs in her pocket, tucked next to Benoît. Her things, light on her shoulder. 

Her last memory is sweet, the rich scent of Héloïse’s hair and the skin of her throat warm against her lips. Marianne has made the image she wants, taking with her the recollection of action, the proof of her desire. She can long but she will not regret.

And then Héloïse claims the last word. There on the stairs, the vision in white, the figure calling out from the painting once more, giving direction instead of complying. Marianne turns around even though she knows how it will end.

And then she shuts the door.

*****

Benoît will never become a hawk, and Paris is hundreds of miles from the sea. These are both solid truths and yet Marianne’s heart aches at the sight of a white bird with bright beak and feet descending from the torn blue sky after a summer storm, coming to rest at the grass near her feet. 

Dark eyes regard her from deep within the snowy feathers. At her elbow, Benoît lifts his head from the blanket.

Marianne stops her sketching, fingers black with chalk. 

“She wants you to know,” Théophane says. “That Milan is full of music and her days are spent alone.”

Marianne draws a breath, and then another. “She is free?” 

“She is alone,” Théophane says.

“Tell her,” Marianne says. _Tell her companionship may be bought. Tell her clocks do not run backwards. Tell her Orpheus broke a promise, and that no matter what enticement she made it was always his choice._

“Ask her if she wishes to learn to paint,” Marianne says.


End file.
